>I don't know of any pre-2010 forums

https://www.vogons.org/ ->Since 2002

https://bbs.archlinux.org -> Since 2003

And so on, just to name two important ones.

The game specific DarkMatters forums has been around for at least 10 years. I personally used it to resolve an issue I was having, when I found a thread[1] by web search. Some nice people helped the OP troubleshoot over almost 2 years until with their help the OP eventually found the issue and explained the fix.

Then the thread went on for a couple more years helping people with similar issues for whom the orginal fix didn't work, until eventually another fix was posted. That other fix was copied over from another forum.

[1]: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-s...

That's odd, it loads in a fraction of a second for me; and I'm on a mobile running android Firefox. Plus I'm on hotel WiFi at the moment.

The OSDev forum (forum.osdev.org) has been around for a while

somethingawful